What is a recipe?
Let’s assume at the beginning that a recipe is an abstract object. In this way recipes are more like novels or songs than they are like tables or chairs. Given that a recipe is an abstract object, there are two ontological questions and one methodological question we can ask about recipes.
First, what are the existence conditions of a recipe? In other words, when does a recipe begin or cease to exist? Platonists about recipes might argue that all recipes have always existed and it just requires someone with the requisite skill or creativity to “see” the recipe and physically instantiate it. A nominalist about recipes would reject this position, instead regarding as real only the physical instantiation of the recipe. The cookbook is real, but the recipes aren’t. This question I think generalizes to abstract objects in general, but for recipes there is the added complication of abstract artifacts. Because recipes are human creations (“creation” used in a loose sense here) it seems odd to think they’ve always existed. Abstracta like “blueness” or “beauty” are plausibly candidates for having always existed, even if no physical particulars instantiate them. But the existence of abstract artifacts is more complex. Perhaps they are called into existence by their inventors and only persist as long as some object instantiates them, someone remembers them, or something like that.
Second, what are the identity conditions of a recipe? This is a surprisingly difficult question. Suppose all recipes have two parts: the ingredients and the instructions. The ingredients part of a recipe is simply a list of the required components of the dish, and the instructions part is a list of imperatives that, if followed, will produce the dish. Now, suppose that two recipes have identical ingredients and instructions, but one lists the ingredients in a different order than the other. Does that matter? It doesn’t seem so. So perhaps these are the same recipe. What if the ingredient quantities are given in a different measurement system? Or the quantities are doubled (so that twice as much food is produced) in one of the recipes? What if the instructions are ordered differently, but this makes no difference to the outcome?
Thinking of recipes as abstract objects lets us take advantage of a kind of mathematical formalism. Suppose recipes are two sets: the unordered set ingredients and the ordered set instructions. Now, because sets have very precise identity conditions we can be very particular about the identity conditions for recipes. But is this formalism necessary, and more importantly does it get the identity conditions of recipes correct?
Finally, there is an important methodological question about recipes. When has a recipe been successfully followed? This question requires an answer to the identity conditions question I think. It is possible that someone believes they’ve successfully followed one recipe when in fact they’ve followed a very slightly different recipe. If the identity conditions for recipes are very narrow, then we probably do this all the time. It is possible that the identity conditions for recipes are so narrow that no one has ever really followed a recipe at all!
This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (201)
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